GatherPress

Documentation for contributors

Last updated July 12, 2026, Version 0.34

GatherPress is built by and for the community — and we’d love your help! Whether you’re a developer, designer, organizer, writer, or enthusiast, there’s a place for you here.

🤝 Ways to Contribute

  • Report or fix issues
  • Improve plugin functionality or accessibility
  • Write or update documentation
  • Translate GatherPress into other languages
  • Test new features or submit feedback
  • Review and comment on pull requests

🧠 Get Started

📝 Changelog Entries

Every pull request that ships a user-visible change should include a changelog entry. The repository uses automattic/jetpack-changelogger — each PR drops one small file into .github/changelog/, and at release time the entries are rolled up into CHANGELOG.md under a new version header. Per-PR files mean no merge conflicts on the changelog.

Three ways to add an entry:

  1. Locally — run composer changelog:add and answer the prompts. The tool writes the file to .github/changelog/ for you to commit.
  2. Via PR description — check the “Automatically create a changelog entry from the details below” checkbox in the pull request template and fill in Significance, Type, and Message. CI parses those sections and creates the file on your branch (for fork PRs, CI posts a comment with the file content to commit manually).
  3. Skip the entry — for changes that don’t need a changelog line (e.g. CI tweaks, internal refactors, docs-only edits), add the Skip Changelog label to the PR.

Draft PRs and PRs not targeting develop are exempt from the check.

🔐 Access & Roles

🏷️ Contributor Credits

GatherPress credits contributors by their WordPress.org username, both on the in-plugin Credits screen and in the WordPress.org attribution. A Props Bot runs on every pull request and posts a maintained comment listing the PR’s contributors (including authors of any linked issues), resolved to their wp.org usernames.

For the bot to resolve you correctly, link your GitHub account on your profiles.wordpress.org profile. If you don’t have a WordPress.org account yet, create a free one at login.wordpress.org/register. Contributors who haven’t linked their accounts won’t resolve cleanly and may need to be credited by hand.

Maintainers can force the bot to refresh its list by adding the Props Bot label to a pull request.

Crediting is automated from there: when a pull request merges into develop, the Credits Sync workflow reads the Props Bot comment and appends anyone not yet credited for the current release cycle to .github/scripts/release/credits/unreleased.json, via a small auto-merging PR. At the next version bump those names move into the release’s credits file and appear on the in-plugin Credits screen. Contributors the bot couldn’t resolve (no linked GitHub account) are skipped by the automation — maintainers add them by hand to unreleased.json or the version’s credits file.

Thanks for helping make GatherPress better! 💜